Estimating Irish party policy positions using computer wordscoring: The 2002 election: A research note

• Main Authors: BENOIT, Kenneth, LAVER, Michael
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2003
• Subjects: Models and Methods; Political Science
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/4000; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/5258/viewcontent/IrishPartyPositions_Wordscoring_2002_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Developments in the computerised analysis of political texts now make itmuch easier than before to investigate large volumes of political text inorder to estimate the policy positions of the authors. Previous contentanalyses of party manifestos, for example, have relied on the hand codingof texts (Budge et al., 1987; Laver and Budge, 1992; Klingeman et al.,1994; Budge et al., 2001), or on dictionary-based computer codingtechniques (Laver and Garry, 2000; Kleinnijenhuis and Pennings, 2001;Garry, 2001; de Vries et al., 2001; Bara, 2001). Such analyses, even thosebased on computer coding dictionaries, require heavy human involvement or intervention, creating both a huge resource cost and thepossibility that the many judgement calls inevitably involved will incorporate the biases of the analyst into the results. In an attempt to move beyond these shortcomings, Laver, Benoit and Garry (2003) developed a new probabilistic 'word-scoring' method for computerisedtext analysis and cross-validated this against completely independent sources of data on policy positions. This work included computerised text analysis of Irish party manifestos from the 1997 elections and thetechnique has recently been extended (Laver and Benoit, 2002) to the analysis of Irish parliamentary speeches. In this article we use the word-scoring technique to estimate the policy positions of Irish party manifestos in the 2002 election on four dimensions: economic policy, social policy, environmental policy, and policy on Northern Ireland. The results reported here are from an analysis that was completed within days of the release of the manifestos, and produced initial results before the election had actually taken place.